Salon.com interview with David Cronenberg – And yet it isn’t quite that way. It’s interesting, it’s true and it’s not true. Until we block the scene, I have no idea what I’m going to do. I bring the actors on the set — nobody else is on the set — and we work out how the scene is going to work. That’s where the actors have a lot of input. I don’t want them to improvise dialogue, because they’re not screenwriters, but in terms of where they move, the choreography of the room, that’s really important and we work that out.

Then I bring my crew in and we show them the scene we’ve worked out, like a little piece of theater. My crew is all around the room, and that’s when everybody knows what the game is. The props people, the set decorators, the sound guys — and then I start to discuss how to shoot it with Peter. At that point, it starts to make sense to me, and that’s when I start to think about how I’m going to cut it, and how much coverage I need and what I don’t need. In other words, it’s very non-storyboard-ish, because blocking the scene with the actors comes first, before I’m thinking of editing at all. Whereas with storyboards, you’re often doing all those things before you even have an actor cast, which to me is extremely the wrong way around.

On the Sexuality of Marilyn Monroe – Other movies, like Some Like It Hot, Bus Stop, and River of No Return treat her persona with kindness and affection, allowing her to operate in a more human space, where her sexiness is just a fact of life, like a mountain range or the ocean.

Black Mirror Interview: Charlie Brooker – These concerns are once again in the foreground of new three-part series Black Mirror, which tells three stand alone horror stories very much in the spirit of The Twilight Zone. But these are highly satirical modern nightmares which use as jumping off points things that wouldn’t have existed even five years ago. Here are stories which take a skewed glance at where we are and where we are headed. They are equal parts funny, disturbing, tragic and horrific – and possibly represent Brooker’s best work to date.

How to Gain 20 Pounds of "Hollywood" Muscle – Okay, you've been hired to train a famous actor for his next movie role. He needs to add 20 pounds of muscle in about 12 weeks to play a superhero. First, give us an overview of how you'd train him.